In the sacraments, spirit and matter "kiss." Heaven and earth embrace in a union that will never end.

When marriage exposes a person's selfishness and sins it's doing what it is meant to do: bringing our sins and wounds to light so we can recognize them, confess them, and begin the healing process.

In a world that has lost a sense of sin, one sin remains: Thou shalt not make people feel guilty (except, of course, about making people feel guilty). In other words, the only sin today is to call something a sin.

For those with the purity to see it, a nursing mother is one of the most precious, most beautiful, and most holy of all possible images of woman.

Holiness is not first a matter of doing anything. It is first and foremost a matter of letting it be done. Holiness is to conceive the love of God within and to bring it forth to the world.

The Church's basic moral principle regarding reproductive technologies is this: if a given technology assists the marital embrace in achieving its natural end, it can be morally acceptable, even praiseworthy. However, if it replaces the marital embrace as the means by which the child is conceived, it's not in keeping with God's design.

The idea that 'preaching the Gospel' has nothing to do with sex and that 'preaching about sex' has nothing to do with the Gospel betrays layers and layers of seriously misguided thinking. When we divorce God's love from sexual love, as Pope Benedict says, 'the essence of Christianity' becomes 'decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.'